Real Heroes

Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me,
but try waking up every morning
& loving the world all over again.

That's what takes a real hero.
(StoryPeople)

“The Situation”

“The Conflict”

How often are these words used to describe the place that I now call home? People ask how “the situation” affects life, politicians talk about “the conflict”, I came to get a better understanding of “the situation” and almost everybody is aiming to solve “the conflict.” The focus is on UN resolutions, UNESCO admittance, peace talks, and quartet delegations. With all this focus on what is happening on the global stage, it is easy to forget about the people who live here every day, who each day wake up and make their life here.

After a recent Sunday morning church service, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Pastor and a group of visiting Lutherans. So much of me wishes I would have recorded this conversation so I could let you listen to it and hear his words and his voice for yourself. He talked about his hopes for a peace that would allow him to keep his rights. He spoke of a hope without optimism. He told stories of being a minority of a minority(Christian=minority #1, Lutheran=#2) but encouraging his congregation to add their “brick” with the hopes that when everybody adds a brick something wonderful can be built. He shared his changing the Lord’s Prayer to “Lead us not into humiliation" each time he crosses the checkpoint. He asked that when we returned home, we returned changed and ready to continue to walk with the Palestinian people. But mostly he reminded us that life is happening here daily:

“When people speak about Palestinians they talk about a people in crisis. They do not speak of the life here. When politicians stop seeing us as a people in crisis and start seeing us as a people with needs and with life, then peace will happen.”

“It isn’t happy all the time, we do cry, but after our crying there is a new day. Life here is a choice. To wake up each morning, that is a choice, that is life here. The parents who decided to get their children an education so they will be ready when there is peace, that is life here. To need permits to cross our borders and visit our holy sites, but to keep trying, that is life here. To be labeled dangerous by a government, and to choose non-violence, that is life here.”

Every day I spent here, I get to spend time working with and getting to know the real heroes here. They are the parents of the children I help teach, the teachers I work with, the host family I live with and the people who continue to share their stories in hopes that somebody will hear them.

Yes, Palestine’s acceptance into UNESCO is a great victory, the UN resolution is important and successful peace talks would be a huge step forward. But I do believe that the real heroes are the people who live here and decide to wake up each morning, choose life and work to love the world are the real heroes.

At this point, I leave you with words from Rafeef Ziadah, a Palestinian spoken word artist and activist. Please take the time to hear her words.

“We teach life, Sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning
to teach the rest of the world life!
Sir!”

Deep Roots

When I die, she said, I'm coming back as a tree with deep roots &
I'll wave my leaves at the children every morning on their way to school &
whisper tree songs at night in their dreams. 

Trees with deep roots know about the things children need.
(StoryPeople)

Olive trees are an everyday part of my life here. They are in my backyard. They are on my way to school. They pepper the fields on the hills across from my house. They are all over. Like apple harvesting back home, olive harvest marks the change in seasons. So as the weather gets a bit colder, those olive trees have surrounded by tarps and filled with people harvesting olives.

The past weekend, I had the chance to participate in two olive harvestings. The first day was spent with a local Palestinian family and the second was at the Lutheran World Federation campus on the Mount of Olives, yep I got to harvest olives on the Mount of Olives! SO COOL!!!

Olive harvesting is a bit of work but a lot of fun. For me it was chance to climb through the trees and get my hands dirty, to be outside in the sun doing work and feel good about accomplishing something.

First the olives must be removed from the tree.
This is done by either “milking” the branches or using a rake like comb. Rather than picking each olive individually they are milked or combed to drop on a large tarp.

After all the olives are out of the tree and on the tarp,
all the olives are gathered into a central location on the tarp and all of the extra branches, leaves and stones are picked out.

Then the olives are dumped into a bag which will be taken to
an olive press to be turned into olive oil.

The olive oil from the olives we harvested on the Mount of Olives will be sold and all proceeds will go to the Augusta Victoria Hospital, for more information about buying this olive oil check here: http://lwfjerusalem.org/projects/olive-oil/

The time spent in harvesting olives was a fantastic opportunity to be a part of Palestinian life.

The 8 trees I harvested with the local family have been in this family “forever,” which as far as we can figure meant several hundred, if not a thousand, years. The trees have lived through so much and if they could talk they would tell us stories of peace and war, struggles and joys, beginnings and ends. They have seen the history of this place and their roots are deeply planted in the land and its history

As we climbed in the trees, we heard the family tell some stories that these trees might tell. They told of olive harvests past, struggles of the present to keep their land and hopes for a peaceful future. And as I sat among the branches of the olive trees hearing this stories, I was struck by how much these trees are like the families and the people that care for them, deeply rooted in their land and in their history.

To see more pictures of olive harvest and other adventures check pictures on Facebook here and here.

I have also just sent out my first newsletter, if you didn’t get it and would like to please e-mail me at gastal01@luther.edu.

Recipes we create

In 2007, a movie called No Reservations- starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Abigail Breslin- was released. This movie follows Kate(Catherine Zeta-Jones), a master chef in NYC, as her life takes a dramatic turn when she becomes the guardian of her nine-year old niece Zoe(Abigail Breslin). (Thanks to IMDB for the summary)

Towards the end of the movie, Kate is talking to her therapist, frustrated with her feelings of failing and uncertainty as she navigates this new chapter of her life and the following conversation takes place:

Kate: I wish there was a cookbook for life, you know? Recipes telling us exactly what to do. I know, I know, you're gonna say "How else will you learn, Kate."

Therapist: mm. No, actually I wasn't going to say that. You want to guess again?

Kate: No, no, go ahead.

Therapist: Well what I was going to say was, you know better than anyone, it's the recipes that you create yourself that are the best.

I think one of the reasons I like this movie is because of my love of cooking. I love the process of creating something new and seeing how it turns out. I love the idea of learning from my failures and attempting to recreate my successes. I love that at the end I have something I can share with people. Once when I asked my mom for some help with a recipe she told me that it was "more of an art than a science." I suppose if it were a science every apple pie and chocolate chip cookie would taste as good as my grandma's!

In the past couple of weeks, my roomie and I have fallen into a wonderful (well, wonderful for me) pattern, where I cook and she cleans up afterward.

I will usually start with what I can find in the kitchen, I will begin the hunt for a recipe. Finding a couple I like, I take the basics-ingredients, temperature and cook time- and then go from there. I add different spices, leave things out if I don’t like them, and make substitutions if something can’t be found. Sometimes the result is not so great, but most of the times I come up with something I am excited about and excited to share: roasted veggies, pita chips, cheesy rice and beans and most recently an apple dessert.

In many ways, this year with YAGM is just one more series of recipes I will create. There is no cookbook for this year, no recipes telling me “exactly what to do.” I have been given some of the basic ingredients: the people, the places and the primary worksite.

However, after that, how the recipes turn out is totally up to me. I get to decide how strong the relationships are, what other places I will add and the extra places I will volunteer. When things don’tgo quite as planned, I get to decide what subsitutions to make and how to tailor the results to make it better. I get to decide what things to say “yes” to some experiences that will enhance and say “no” to the things that I don’t think will fit. I get to create something new, learn from my mistakes and in the end share it with people when I return home. And at the end of the year, I will have a few brand new recipes to add to the cookbook of my life.

Small pools of light

My favorite time of day is just at dark
when all thoughts of what must be done stop &
small pools of light
come alive on tired faces everywhere.
~StoryPeople

This past Thursday night, Courtney and I had the opportunity to attended a retirement party for a former science teacher at Beit Sahour School. This teacher also happens to be my host mother. It was a wonderful night full of good food (LOTS AND LOTS OF GOOD FOOD!), stories, jokes and laughter.

As is the theme in my life right now, I understood barely any of the conversation because it was mostly in Arabic, except for the pieces that were in English for our benefit. However, despite not being able to understand the specifics of what were being said, it was pretty easy to understand the overall of the night.

We were gathering to celebrate the years that my host mom had worked at the school, and it was easy to see how much all of the other teachers loved her and how much she loved them all. That love filled the room and became a contagious energy. It was kind of like one of those commercials for Olive Garden where friends and family are sitting at a table passing food and alaughing, except rather than pasta and breadsticks it was hummus and kebobs being passed around.

As I sat and looked around the room, taking in the joy, laughter and love, I saw the “small pools of light come alive on tired faces.”

Taybeh

What do you think when you think of Oktoberfest?

If you are like me, you think of Germans, brats, polka and beer. If you are like me, nothing about Oktoberfest makes you think Palestine.

Well, this weekend past weekend the YAGMs got the opportunity to attend the wonderfully cultural event of Palestinian Oktoberfest. Yep, that’s right, we attended Oktoberfest in Palestine. Since 2005, the annual Oktoberfest happens in Taybeh. Taybeh (which means good in Arabic) is a town famous for its olive trees, figs, grapes and almonds, plus it is believed to be the village where Jesus stayed with the disciples before the crucifixion.

Taybeh is also famous because it is home to the brewery of the only Palestinian brewed beer-Taybeh. So every year, Oktoberfest happens to celebrate all that is Taybeh. It is a wonderful opportunity to enjoy good food, live music, dancing and yes Taybeh beer. We feasted doughnuts and ice cream, saw a Sri Lanka dancer and heard a Spanish Folk Rock band (at a Palestianian Oktoberfest, talk about culture shock). It was a time of joyous celebration, see the below clip for some ideas of what happened.

However, if that was all that Taybeh was, I probably would not be blogging about it. Taybeh is not just a beer and Oktoberfest is not just a chance to gather for good times. Rather, they are a celebration of Palestine, and at their very core a part of the resistance. In the words of the Taybeh brochure:

Every thing about Taybeh is extremely revolutionary,

if not extraordinary.

In the middle of intense conflict, you find a community

striving to be normal and crying out to the world for the need to do astonishing things in the middle of oppressed conditions.

Taybeh responds with peaceful resolutions of celebrating its existence.

So the weekend is also full of Palestinian food (Shawarma, Falafel), Palestinian art, Palestinian dancing(dabka) and Palestinian based musicians, like Toot Ard,:

From what we can figure the chorus translates “Peace with you, Beautiful Peace”

So aside from being a joyous celebration and beautiful weekend, it was also a chance to gather and to celebrate the beauty of the Palestinian culture. The celebration of all that Palestine has to offer serves as a way to say, we are here, don’t forget about us. It was also a powerful reminder that while there are debates happening on the international level, the real revolution and real resistance are happening in little ways, every day on the ground in “normal Palestinian” life.

Yummy, yummy falafel

Crowd enjoying Toot Ard.

“My name is Palestine and I will be Palestinian forever.”

Bethlehem based Hajj MC.

Years that ask questions

Just before I left for Chicago, a dear friend gave me a box of quotes, pictures and fun facts, one for each day of the upcoming year. The other day my fun fact was that “the average 4 year old asks over 400 questions a day.”

After working with the Kindergarten class, I would believe it. The kids are super adorable

and full of curiosity. Now most of the time I don’t actually understand what questions are being asked, as they are usually in Arabic. Ok, they are always in Arabic. Sometimes I can figure out what the questions are, but usually not, so most of the time a question or statement is jabbered at me, a confused look passes over my face and the child scampers off to continue whatever they were doing.

This whole process can be pretty frustrating. The not being able to understand or respond or even communicate basic requests is challenging. But the beautiful thing is that it has taught me the universal language of high 5s, smiles and goofy faces. On these days it is amazing to simply be surrounded by the easy joy and amazement of children.

Yet, many times I end up feeling like the four-year old asking 400 hundred questions: “Shu hada?” (“What’s this?”). Shu ismek/ismak? (What’s your name (m/f)?). My questions are usually answered with a following response of laughter, rolled eyes and as much frustration and indignation as a 5-6 year old can muster when I totally butcher the pronunciation of the word they have told me.

But the questions continue outside of school as well as I continue to try to navigate around. Questions about where things are, questions about what things mean, questions about the culture, questions of how things work, questions of who people are and so on and so forth.

While sometimes all of these questions are frustrating and I am often left with more questions than answers, there is a great joy in learning again to look with the inquisitive eyes of a 4 year old. To question everything around me and find joy in discovering an answer.

I leave you with a quote that accurately describes this year for me, plus some pictures of cute children to make you smile.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

~Unknown

Big Strange Family

I don't think of it as
working for world peace,
she said.
I think of it as just trying to get along in a
really big strange family.
(StoryPeople)

We have been here for a week and a half now, and it has been quite the experience. As we have started to orientate ourselves to this place, I have come to love the people, the places, and the food. Yet, in the midst of all of this orientation, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand what it happening around me. I struggle to grasp the language, the politics and the geography.

It is a challenge to find the words to share all of these experiences, and should the words be found it would have to be a really long blog. So, for now I will leave you with a story that has provided me with inspiration, hope and joy.

Today was my first day at Beit Sahour School, where I will be working for the next year. We spent a fair amount of time just hanging out in the library and doing a few random odd tasks, as we get more familiar with the school our jobs will become more clear. However, at one point I was asked to join an interview of a younag woman, 15 years old. The interview was for a chance to go to Poland for a conference about conflict resolution and I was asked to join because I was a native English speaker.

This young woman was asked to introduce herself and a few other questions but her answers to two of the questions stood out to me. The first was when one of the interviewers asked if she would have any problems working with Israelis or Jews, and her response was pretty simple, but also profound: “No, because they are humans too. It doesn’t matter what Israel’s policies are…They {the people she would be meeting} are just human beings.” She continued on to talk about wanting to share her story, and try to understand how they felt and why they felt the way they felt.

A bit later, she was asked how she would feel working with Muslims. Again, she responded similarly, and talked about “that if we believe that we are all from God” that we should “get to know each other and understand for ourselves.”

This young woman was only 15 years old, but in her words I found a light that I had forgotten as I struggle with the enormity of the challenges and struggles around me. My year here is not about solving the conflict, rather, it is about learning about and creating a new family.